Journal about living in a concentration camp:+ Emily Will
(These are real facts)
Monday, May 5th 1942 My family and I were taken from our home in Hungary; we've each been taken to separate locations. I am going to Buchenwald, my mom and my six year old brother are going to Auschwitz in Poland, and my dad is going to Ravensbruck. I have heard rumors about the concentration camps, and the rumors were not pleasant. Some of the rumors I heard were that you have to work at factories and they do experiments on you. I am very scared thinking about what will happen to me and my family. We rode a train that was very old and gross to get to the camps. I arrived at Buchenwald, and the Nazi's shaved my head and gave me a striped uniform to wear for the rest of the time I stay there, which might be the rest of my life. When I step into the camp, I hear a bunch of gunshots. I look and see the five people that have just been shot fall into a big hole in the earth. The Nazi's make the other prisoners cover the hole up; the Nazi's are so cruel. Concentration camps are facilities that hold Jews, gypsies, the mentally ill, homosexuals, and many other kinds of people. In the concentration camps, the people are tortured. The reason why certain people are in the camps is because Hitler does not like those people and thinks that there is something wrong with them.
Tuesday, August 12th 1942 I wake up at 4 am with a Nazi yelling at me to get up. I have to find my shoes; if I don't find my shoes, I can't work, and I will most likely die. But that won't happen because I always keep my shoes under my bed. I have to make my bed real nice or the Nazi's will beat me. For breakfast, I have to bring my mess-can ( mess-can is a can you put food in) with me because if I don't bring my mess-can I can't eat. I get in line and wait; while I'm waiting, I wonder to my self what will happen to me, will I ever get out or will I die in here? It is finally my turn and all we get is bread and tasteless coffee. The food is so horrible; the bread has wood shavings in it; the coffee tastes just like water, and it is not even warm, but if I don't eat, I will die from starvation. All afternoon I am cutting wood, doing manual labor. No one talks except the Nazi that is watching us and commanding that we work harder. I just noticed the watch towers; if you look hard enough, you can see men with big guns standing in the towers waiting for anybody who dares to escape. The man who has a kind face just got whipped because he wasn't working hard enough, so I better get going. I work for what seems like hours; finally we get to eat. After I eat, I go back to my barrack. Sadly the blockfuerher teased us, by making us run, jump, and crawl till we faint. Finally he lets us lay on our straw beds.
Friday, January 24th 1943
Again I wake up, and I find my shoes right away. I make my bed, but apparently I did not make my bed well enough, and I got beaten. After that, I go to the food hall, and I wait in line. When I get my food a Nazi comes up behind me and knocks it out of my hand. So today I will not get any breakfast and most likely be starving the rest of the day. Today instead of manual labor, sinceI have been good, I get to work in the kitchen. While I'm working in the kitchen, I find a sack of potatoes. When no one is looking I steal potatoes for when I get hungry later. Fordinner we have vegetable soup. In the soup there are only a few small chunks of potatoes and a gross slimy broth that tastes like toilet water. It is good enough for me, because I didn't have breakfast. The disease typhus has just broken out, and hundreds of people have already died. I see the dead being taken to the crematoria (crematoria is where the Nazi's burned the dead). I think I'm starting to catch a bug,so I better keep an eye on it because if it does turn out to be typhus, I will probably die. The conditions of the camps are really bad; there is no health care or anything that prevents illness; the camps are not clean, and there are many diseases. It is winter here, and it is very cold, but all we have to wear are the striped uniforms that are not very warm. They don't give us sweaters or coats. A lots of the twins in the concentration camps get experimented on to find a cure for diseases. I have to go to bed now, so see you in the morning, hopefully.
Wednesday, April 1st 1943
I have just learned that my mom and brother have been gassed because they were weak. My dad has moved to Auschwitz-Birkenau, that is one extermination camp out of six built so far. All that malnutrition and being whipped/beaten has made him too weak that the Nazis have no need of him anymore. I have Typhus, but I am not telling anybody because they will kill me or send me to Auschwitz-Birkenau with my father. I just feel like rolling into a ball and crying so much that it kills me. But I can't because I am praying that a miracle happens. Life in camp has gotten easier because I am used to the labor, but since I am getting so skinny that you can see every bone in my body, it is also getting harder for me to do things like standing.
Thursday, June 30th 1943
I have been moved to Auschwitz-Birkenau with my father because they saw how weak I have gotten. This guarantees that we will not make it. I am still praying for a miracle. I sleep in the same cabin as my dad, so I have more hope. My dad has gotten very skinny; I remember when my dad was bigger than what he was supposed to be and everybody teased him, but that was because we always had a big dinner filled with everything you could think of. I would trade anything for those times or a big dinner like that.
Sunday October 12th 1943
It is my birthday today, and guess what, I had soup in the evening and there was a big chunk of carrot-my favorite vegetable! My dad keeps getting worse; he looks like a walking zombie. I really hope the war gets done soon because I don't know how much longer he is going to make it. I still have typhus, but it is getting better.
Monday October 13th 1943
I can't believe it! My dad is dead, and I watched him die. This is what happened. This morning I was making my bed and the blockfuerher came around to check the beds. He saw my dad's bed and said it looked horrible, so he started to whip my dad. I cried and screamed for him to stop, but he didn't. As he whipped my dad, my dad stopped fighting back and laid there. When the blockfuerher stopped, my dad was already dead. Now I have lost all hope; there is no place for me to stay, and I don't want to live without my family.
Tuesday, March 29th 1944
Today the Nazis are making a plan. Sadly, I think all of my barrack is going to get exterminated. I really don't care because all my hope is lost, and my dad died. Life is horrible for me; I hope I die. Wednesday, March 30th 1944
Today the Nazis come to get us. They starve us the whole day while we work. They then take us to a mountain side way back in the woods. They say its full of food, and we actually believed them, so all of us ran inside actually, there is nothing in here. Then, we realize they are gassing us. I am choking for breath.
Afterword:
World War 2 ended August 1945, about 6 million Jews died in the concentration camps. The Allies liberated the concentration camps in 1943-1945 but a lot of them were to late for many many people. Only a small amount of people survive who were in the camps.
A survivor of a concentration camp
the concentration camp Ravensbruck
some of the people who died in auschwitz concentraton camp
-Dachau, one of the first Nazi concentration camps, opened in March 1933,
-Six death or extermination camps were constructed in Poland
.
-The death camps proved to be a better, faster, less personal method for killing Jews, one that would spare the shooters, not the victims, emotional anguish
.
-Nazis began using gassing vans--trucks loaded with groups of people who were locked in and asphyxiated by carbon monoxide. These vans were used until the completion of the first death camp, Chelmno, which began operations in late 1941
-Of the approximately 6 million Jews murdered in the Holocaust, more than half were systematically exterminated in the highly rationalized gas chamber/crematorium system of the Nazi Death Camps between 1942 and 1945.
-By the late 1930s there were literally hundreds of camps scattered throughout Germany
–Concentration camps were camps that the Jewish, Gypsies, or other people were forced to go to, to be tortured or forced to do work. Adolf Hitler and the German Nazi Soldiers did not like those kind of people so they decided to put them in camps, called Concentration camps. They put them in these camps mostly because of their looks and their religion. The camps were built to fit many people in them. –Some of the ways the Germans killed them were by poisonous gas and testing medical experiments on the people. Some of the experiments that the Germans tested on their prisoners were diseases and the cures for them.
—Auschwitz was the largest concentration camp. Auschwitz was located in Poland. It was made up of 3 concentration camps in one.
—The people were sent from a forced labor camp to a death camp when they became old or when they were weak to be killed.
—Some were also tested for experiments that tested medical things, such as diseases and cures. About 1 ¼ million people were killed at Auschwitz during World War II.
—Buchenwald was one of the first and the biggest concentration camps. It was built in 1937 in Weimar, Germany.
—It held 20,000 prisoners and most of them worked as slaves in near by factories. There were no gas chambers in Buchenwald, but many died from disease, little food or the wrong kind of food (malnutrition), exhaustion, beatings, and executions. Prisoners were used to test the viruses and their vaccines.
—In 1945 the war ended. By then all the concentration camps were closed. Very few people survived. Many died due to the harsh conditions of the camps, the experiments, the torturing, and the killing. You were lucky if you survived!
—To facilitate the "Final Solution" (the genocide or mass destruction of the Jews), the Nazis established extermination camps in Poland, the country with the largest Jewish population.
—the first extermination camp, opened in December 1941. Jews and Roma were gassed in mobile gas vans
—The Nazis constructed gas chambers (rooms that filled with poison gas to kill those inside) to increase killing efficiency and to make the process more impersonal for the perpetrators.
—At the Auschwitz camp complex, the Birkenau extermination camp had four gas chambers. During the height of deportations to the camp, up to 6,000 Jews were gassed there each day.
—Millions of people were imprisoned and abused in the various types of Nazi camps. Under SS management, the Germans and their collaborators murdered more than three million Jews in the extermination camps alone. Only a small fraction of those imprisoned in Nazi camps survived.
—The first groups to be detained were Communists and Jews, but later Gypsies, homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses, the mentally ill, and many others were also forced into the camps.
—Beginning in 1942, the Nazis implemented what they called the "Final Solution to the Jewish Question"—an attempt to kill every Jew in Europe. Jews from all parts of Europe that were under Nazi control were rounded up and killed in mass executions or sent to concentration camps where thousands were killed each day in gas chambers. This mass slaughter has come to be known as the Holocaust.
—The most infamous of the concentration camps were Buchenwald, Dachau, and Ravensbrück, in Germany, and Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka, and Chelmno, in Poland
—In Dachau, one of the largest camps in Germany proper, crematoria were constructed for disposal of corpses. There was also a gas chambers constructed at Dachau; however, there is no evidence to this point that they were ever used for extermination. Presumably, the crematoria displayed on the left were used for disposing of the corpses of those who perished from other causes. There were other execution devices at Dachau, such as a gallows, and presumably prisoners were executed and disposed of there.
Will
(These are real facts)
Monday, May 5th 1942
My family and I were taken from our home in Hungary; we've each been taken to separate locations. I am going to Buchenwald, my mom and my six year old brother are going to Auschwitz in Poland, and my dad is going to Ravensbruck. I have heard rumors about the concentration camps, and the rumors were not pleasant. Some of the rumors I heard were that you have to work at factories and they do experiments on you. I am very scared thinking about what will happen to me and my family. We rode a train that was very old and gross to get to the camps. I arrived at Buchenwald, and the Nazi's shaved my head and gave me a striped uniform to wear for the rest of the time I stay there, which might be the rest of my life. When I step into the camp, I hear a bunch of gunshots. I look and see the five people that have just been shot fall into a big hole in the earth. The Nazi's make the other prisoners cover the hole up; the Nazi's are so cruel. Concentration camps are facilities that hold Jews, gypsies, the mentally ill, homosexuals, and many other kinds of people. In the concentration camps, the people are tortured. The reason why certain people are in the camps is because Hitler does not like those people and thinks that there is something wrong with them.
Tuesday, August 12th 1942
I wake up at 4 am with a Nazi yelling at me to get up. I have to find my shoes; if I don't find my shoes, I can't work, and I will most likely die. But that won't happen because I always keep my shoes under my bed. I have to make my bed real nice or the Nazi's will beat me.
For breakfast, I have to bring my mess-can ( mess-can is a can you put food in) with me because if I don't bring my mess-can I can't eat. I get in line and wait; while I'm waiting, I wonder to my self what will happen to me, will I ever get out or will I die in here? It is finally my turn and all we get is bread and tasteless coffee. The food is so horrible; the bread has wood shavings in it; the coffee tastes just like water, and it is not even warm, but if I don't eat, I will die from starvation. All afternoon I am cutting wood, doing manual labor. No one talks except the Nazi that is watching us and commanding that we work harder. I just noticed the watch towers; if you look hard enough, you can see men with big guns standing in the towers waiting for anybody who dares to escape. The man who has a kind face just got whipped because he wasn't working hard enough, so I better get going. I work for what seems like hours; finally we get to eat. After I eat, I go back to my barrack. Sadly the blockfuerher teased us, by making us run, jump, and crawl till we faint. Finally he lets us lay on our straw beds.
Friday, January 24th 1943
Again I wake up, and I find my shoes right away. I make my bed, but apparently I did not make my bed well enough, and I got beaten. After that, I go to the food hall, and I wait in line. When I get my food a Nazi comes up behind me and knocks it out of my hand. So today I will not get any breakfast and most likely be starving the rest of the day. Today instead of manual labor, since I have been good, I get to work in the kitchen. While I'm working in the kitchen, I find a sack of potatoes. When no one is looking I steal potatoes for when I get hungry later. For dinner we have vegetable soup. In the soup there are only a few small chunks of potatoes and a gross slimy broth that tastes like toilet water. It is good enough for me, because I didn't have breakfast. The disease typhus has just broken out, and hundreds of people have already died. I see the dead being taken to the crematoria (crematoria is where the Nazi's burned the dead). I think I'm starting to catch a bug, so I better keep an eye on it because if it does turn out to be typhus, I will probably die. The conditions of the camps are really bad; there is no health care or anything that prevents illness; the camps are not clean, and there are many diseases. It is winter here, and it is very cold, but all we have to wear are the striped uniforms that are not very warm. They don't give us sweaters or coats. A lots of the twins in the concentration camps get experimented on to find a cure for diseases. I have to go to bed now, so see you in the morning, hopefully.
Wednesday, April 1st 1943
I have just learned that my mom and brother have been gassed because they were weak. My dad has moved to Auschwitz-Birkenau, that is one extermination camp out of six built so far. All that malnutrition and being whipped/beaten has made him too weak that the Nazis have no need of him anymore. I have Typhus, but I am not telling anybody because they will kill me or send me to Auschwitz-Birkenau with my father. I just feel like rolling into a ball and crying so much that it kills me. But I can't because I am praying that a miracle happens. Life in camp has gotten easier because I am used to the labor, but since I am getting so skinny that you can see every bone in my body, it is also getting harder for me to do things like standing.
Thursday, June 30th 1943
I have been moved to Auschwitz-Birkenau with my father because they saw how weak I have gotten. This guarantees that we will not make it. I am still praying for a miracle. I sleep in the same cabin as my dad, so I have more hope. My dad has gotten very skinny; I remember when my dad was bigger than what he was supposed to be and everybody teased him, but that was because we always had a big dinner filled with everything you could think of. I would trade anything for those times or a big dinner like that.
Sunday October 12th 1943
It is my birthday today, and guess what, I had soup in the evening and there was a big chunk of carrot-my favorite vegetable! My dad keeps getting worse; he looks like a walking zombie. I really hope the war gets done soon because I don't know how much longer he is going to make it. I still have typhus, but it is getting better.
Monday October 13th 1943
I can't believe it! My dad is dead, and I watched him die. This is what happened. This morning I was making my bed and the blockfuerher came around to check the beds. He saw my dad's bed and said it looked horrible, so he started to whip my dad. I cried and screamed for him to stop, but he didn't. As he whipped my dad, my dad stopped fighting back and laid there. When the blockfuerher stopped, my dad was already dead. Now I have lost all hope; there is no place for me to stay, and I don't want to live without my family.
Tuesday, March 29th 1944
Today the Nazis are making a plan. Sadly, I think all of my barrack is going to get exterminated. I really don't care because all my hope is lost, and my dad died. Life is horrible for me; I hope I die.
Wednesday, March 30th 1944
Today the Nazis come to get us. They starve us the whole day while we work. They then take us to a mountain side way back in the woods. They say its full of food, and we actually believed them, so all of us ran inside actually, there is nothing in here. Then, we realize they are gassing us. I am choking for breath.
Afterword:
World War 2 ended August 1945, about 6 million Jews died in the concentration camps. The Allies liberated the concentration camps in 1943-1945 but a lot of them were to late for many many people. Only a small amount of people survive who were in the camps.
Notes:
http://fcit.usf.edu/HOLOCAUST/TIMELINE/camps.htm
-Dachau, one of the first Nazi concentration camps, opened in March 1933,
-Six death or extermination camps were constructed in Poland
.
-The death camps proved to be a better, faster, less personal method for killing Jews, one that would spare the shooters, not the victims, emotional anguish
.
-Nazis began using gassing vans--trucks loaded with groups of people who were locked in and asphyxiated by carbon monoxide. These vans were used until the completion of the first death camp, Chelmno, which began operations in late 1941
-Of the approximately 6 million Jews murdered in the Holocaust, more than half were systematically exterminated in the highly rationalized gas chamber/crematorium system of the Nazi Death Camps between 1942 and 1945.
-By the late 1930s there were literally hundreds of camps scattered throughout Germany
http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/article.php?lang=en&ModuleId=10005144
-Between 1933 and 1945, Nazi Germany established about 20,000 camps to imprison its many millions of victims
-Millions of people were imprisoned and abused in the various types of Nazi camps.
-the Germans and their collaborators murdered more than three million Jews in the extermination camps alone.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_concentration_camps
-The camps were liberated by the Allies between 1943 and 1945, often too late to save the prisoners remaining.
notes:
http://library.thinkquest.org/CR0210520/concentration_camps.htm
–Concentration camps were camps that the Jewish, Gypsies, or other people were forced to go to, to be tortured or forced to do work. Adolf Hitler and the German Nazi Soldiers did not like those kind of people so they decided to put them in camps, called Concentration camps. They put them in these camps mostly because of their looks and their religion. The camps were built to fit many people in them.
–Some of the ways the Germans killed them were by poisonous gas and testing medical experiments on the people. Some of the experiments that the Germans tested on their prisoners were diseases and the cures for them.
—Auschwitz was the largest concentration camp. Auschwitz was located in Poland. It was made up of 3 concentration camps in one.
—The people were sent from a forced labor camp to a death camp when they became old or when they were weak to be killed.
—Some were also tested for experiments that tested medical things, such as diseases and cures. About 1 ¼ million people were killed at Auschwitz during World War II.
—Buchenwald was one of the first and the biggest concentration camps. It was built in 1937 in Weimar, Germany.
—It held 20,000 prisoners and most of them worked as slaves in near by factories. There were no gas chambers in Buchenwald, but many died from disease, little food or the wrong kind of food (malnutrition), exhaustion, beatings, and executions. Prisoners were used to test the viruses and their vaccines.
—In 1945 the war ended. By then all the concentration camps were closed. Very few people survived. Many died due to the harsh conditions of the camps, the experiments, the torturing, and the killing. You were lucky if you survived!
http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/article.php?lang=en&ModuleId=10005144
—To facilitate the "Final Solution" (the genocide or mass destruction of the Jews), the Nazis established extermination camps in Poland, the country with the largest Jewish population.
—the first extermination camp, opened in December 1941. Jews and Roma were gassed in mobile gas vans
—The Nazis constructed gas chambers (rooms that filled with poison gas to kill those inside) to increase killing efficiency and to make the process more impersonal for the perpetrators.
—At the Auschwitz camp complex, the Birkenau extermination camp had four gas chambers. During the height of deportations to the camp, up to 6,000 Jews were gassed there each day.
—Millions of people were imprisoned and abused in the various types of Nazi camps. Under SS management, the Germans and their collaborators murdered more than three million Jews in the extermination camps alone. Only a small fraction of those imprisoned in Nazi camps survived.
http://history.howstuffworks.com/world-war-ii/nazi-concentration-camps.htm
—The first groups to be detained were Communists and Jews, but later Gypsies, homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses, the mentally ill, and many others were also forced into the camps.
—Beginning in 1942, the Nazis implemented what they called the "Final Solution to the Jewish Question"—an attempt to kill every Jew in Europe. Jews from all parts of Europe that were under Nazi control were rounded up and killed in mass executions or sent to concentration camps where thousands were killed each day in gas chambers. This mass slaughter has come to be known as the Holocaust.
—The most infamous of the concentration camps were Buchenwald, Dachau, and Ravensbrück, in Germany, and Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka, and Chelmno, in Poland
—In Dachau, one of the largest camps in Germany proper, crematoria were constructed for disposal of corpses. There was also a gas chambers constructed at Dachau; however, there is no evidence to this point that they were ever used for extermination. Presumably, the crematoria displayed on the left were used for disposing of the corpses of those who perished from other causes. There were other execution devices at Dachau, such as a gallows, and presumably prisoners were executed and disposed of there.
—